Music

25 songs that tell us where music is going

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This sort of interactive media exploration is something the New York Times does very well. Just a heads up: Some of the song lyrics are NSFW and the songs play when they scroll into view, so consider headphones before you dig in.

But do dig in.

Deep list of top albums from a specific year

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Have a favorite year for music? One year that you know better than all others? Perhaps the year when you first really connected with music, the first year that gives you true nostalgia?

With that year in mind, go to rateyourmusic.com and step through that year’s chart of top albums. No matter how well you know the music of your year, I think you’ll be surprised. And I’d wager you’ll find some highly rated albums you’ve never even heard of.

This is an excellent way to discover new music, especially if you are signed up for a service like Apple Music so you can start listening to these new albums immediately.

To get you started, here’s a link to the top albums of the year 2000. To switch to your year, just edit the URL.

Weird Al releases rare Beatles cover as a sneak peek at his late 2017 boxed set

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[VIDEO] Weird Al has a career-spanning boxed set in the works, due for release this November. One track in the set is a never-commercially-released Beatles cover (video embedded in the main Loop post). I’m told that Weird Al recorded this in his garage, sent it to Dr. Demento, but Beatles’ lawyers sent him a cease and desist to prevent him from releasing it. Not sure what’s changed.

If you like Weird Al, this is some excellent work. Enjoy.

Ticketmaster for iOS adds Apple Music integration for easily tracking upcoming concerts

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Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Ticketmaster for iOS was today updated with Apple Music integration, allowing users to more easily find upcoming concerts based on what’s in their Apple Music library.

The update pushes the app 1.10.2 and makes it significantly easier to quickly know when an artist you love is touring.

A terrific idea. I wish that Apple Music had a tour date interface built in, the ability to send me notifications when a band I specify announces tour dates. They could no doubt sell tickets to the concerts from within the notification. This exist?

Drag and drop to make your own mix of rap and pop

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Drag a song from the left onto a song on the right, then sit back and listen.

This works really well. Seems to me, this would make an excellent app, especially if you could figure out a general approach that mapped all the songs in a playlist. I see possibilities here.

How Apple can make music sound sweeter

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Dan Moren, Macworld:

Even as the company continues to push its Apple Music venture, there are a few places where Apple would be better served by re-examining the way it approaches music. From services to software to hardware, Apple’s gotten pretty comfortable about where it stands with music—but not necessarily because it has the best solutions out there.

Dan digs into three specific areas: Fixing iTunes and Music apps, improving AirPlay, and improving the speaker situation.

One particular snippet I found intriguing:

Granted, perhaps it would be more effective to just snap up Sonos—especially if Apple could find a way to integrate Siri.

I can’t imagine this isn’t on an Apple drawing board somewhere.

In case your metronome breaks

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[VIDEO] She starts slow, then gets into the rhythm, so watch through to the end. Wish I could play like this. Video on the main Loop post.

AI and the path to creating jingles and pop hits

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Alex Marshall, writing for the New York Times, pulled together a fascinating piece, a bit of a survey of the current state of artificial intelligence and songwriting.

My 2 cents: All of this music is on the wrong side of the uncanny valley, but it is definitely getting closer. And I do think it will get there. Which is a scary proposition, given how difficult it already is for humans to make a living as musicians.

Music streaming now has more paying subscribers than Netflix

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Music Business Worldwide:

According to a recent report from the much-respected Midia, there were 100.4m people paying for music streaming subscriptions at the end of 2016.

The company’s Mark Mulligan estimates that around 43m of these were subscribing to Spotify, with 20.9m signed up to Apple Music, 6.9m to Deezer, 4.5m to Napster and just 1m to TIDAL.

The rest of the 100.4m subs were made up of other services, suggest Midia’s numbers.

And:

Meanwhile, Netflix is currently forecasting that it finished 2016 with 87.8m paying subscribers – a 24% jump on its Q4 2015 number (70.8m.)

Both are still growing by leaps and bounds, but music streaming, at the moment, is growing more quickly.

Here’s a link to the original streaming report from Midia.

HBO to debut documentary on partnership and bond between Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine

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HBO press release:

THE DEFIANT ONES, a four-part documentary event, will debut on HBO in 2017, it was announced today by Casey Bloys, president, HBO Programming. Director Allen Hughes (“Menace II Society”) has made an unquestionably bold film about the unlikely but ultimately unbreakable bond of trust and friendship between two street-smart men from different worlds who have shaped many of the most exciting and extreme moments in recent pop culture.

And:

Set amid many of the defining events of the past four decades, THE DEFIANT ONES tells the stories of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre — one the son of a Brooklyn longshoreman, the other straight out of Compton — and their improbable partnership and surprising leading roles in a series of transformative events in contemporary culture.

And:

Allen Hughes filmed Iovine and Dre over a three-year period in making THE DEFIANT ONES. In addition to extensive interviews with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, who speak frankly about their highs and lows, the show includes interviews with such music icons as Bono, David Geffen, Eminen, Nas, Ice Cube, Gwen Stefani, Jon Landau, Tom Petty, Trent Reznor, Snoop Dogg, Bruce Springsteen and will.i.am. The series also features never-before-seen footage from a multitude of recording and writing sessions with Eazy-E, JJ Fad, Stevie Nicks, N.W.A., Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and U2, among others.

I will definitely watch this.

YouTube reaches settlement over songwriting royalties

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Ben Sisario, New York Times:

On Thursday, YouTube, which is by most estimates the most popular destination for music online, announced that it had reached a settlement with the National Music Publishers’ Association, a trade group, over the complex issue of unpaid songwriting royalties.

And:

In a persistent problem for the online music business, large numbers of songs have missing or incorrect data about their songwriters and which music publishers represent them, leaving what is widely estimated to be millions of dollars unpaid.

And:

The agreement with YouTube, which is owned by Google, will give participating publishers — the companies that traditionally manage songwriting rights, which are separate from those of recordings — access to a list of songs for which YouTube has missing or incomplete rights data. YouTube will then pay any accrued royalties from a fund it has set aside for this purpose.

The best solution would be to get the data right in the first place, to make sure the songwriters who wrote the song that drives YouTube’s music views get paid properly. But this seems a step in the right direction.

Soundbreaking: A phenomenal documentary on the art of music recording

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If you love music, this 8-part series from PBS is for you. I’ve made it through parts 1 and 2 so far, and they are both fascinating and riveting. The list of artists involved in this project is astonishing. Starting with George Martin and the Beatles, it’s a real who’s who of modern music, a true insider’s view.

Episode One is embedded in the main Loop post.

Here’s a link to the main site.

And here’s a link to the PBS site hosting other episodes.

Ars Technica: Spotify writing massive amounts of junk data, shortening SSD lives

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Dan Goodwin, writing for Ars Technica:

For almost five months—possibly longer—the Spotify music streaming app has been assaulting users’ storage devices with enough data to potentially take years off their expected lifespans. Reports of tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes being written in an hour aren’t uncommon, and occasionally the recorded amounts are measured in terabytes. The overload happens even when Spotify is idle and isn’t storing any songs locally.

And:

Spotify officials hadn’t responded to Ars questions more than two days after they were sent. According to comments left in the Spotify forum in the past 24 hours, the bug has been fixed in version 1.0.42, which is in the process of being rolled out. The update remains unavailable to many users, this reporter included. And that means Spotify’s drive-assaulting behavior continues unabated for many.

Sounds like, if you use Spotify, get the update or disable it.

Phil Collins performs “In the Air Tonight” on Jimmy Fallon

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[VIDEO] Before you watch the video below, take a minute to watch the setup interview, where Phil Collins talks about the song and you can see Roots drummer Questlove getting a bit nervous taking on an incredibly well known drum moment.

Bottom line, Questlove does a fine job and Phil Collins and the band do this classic justice.

Enjoy.

Incredible Halloween light show – Highway to Hell

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[VIDEO] Happy Halloween, Loop friends. The video below has an awesome light show, but BEWARE, there are lots of flashing lights, so don’t start the video if that will cause you harm.

Blistering footage of a young AC/DC from 1978

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This is phenomenal footage. The venue is a small hall at the University of Essex in Colchester, England, in October of 1978. Angus Young’s guitar-work truly is blistering. Hard to believe he’s only 23 here. Great to watch. Turn it up!

Welcome to the Machine, cover by Danny Godinez

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I love this cover of Pink Floyd’s classic, Welcome to the Machine. Give it a few minutes for him to get into the groove. Amazing that this is all done on an acoustic.

Be sure to stick around for the guitar change around 7:27 in.

Amazon’s full on-demand streaming music service launches today

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Dan Seifert, writing for The Verge:

Amazon’s long-rumored on-demand music streaming service is now available. The company is launching its new service as Amazon Music Unlimited, a on-demand competitor to the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play Music. Amazon has done a number of things to differentiate Music Unlimited from its competitors, but the most notable one is its price: the service will be available to Amazon Prime members for $7.99 per month or $79 per year, which is cheaper than the premium options from Spotify or Apple Music. In addition, owners of one of Amazon’s voice-controlled Echo devices will be able to get the service for just $3.99 per month.

Key to me:

And while the Echo-only plan is limited to only one device (you cannot use it on your phone, PC, tablet, or even more than one Echo device), it still offers the same content library, recommendations, and other features that the full service provides.

This means, with the Echo-only plan, there’s no way to take this music on the road with me, either by car, plane, on my bike or for a run.

I find it interesting that folks who buy into the Echo-ecosystem can get a discount, but one with some significant omissions.

Phish’s Things People Do recorded completely on an iPhone

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Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Ezrin gave the band members specific instructions: Learn and play 10 folk songs, then start writing, beginning with a folk song. Mr. McConnell’s effort, “Things People Do,” not only made the final cut, but the version included is his demo. Phish made multiple versions of the song before agreeing that nothing topped the original low-fi version, recorded on Mr. McConnell’s iPhone, sitting atop a Wurlitzer piano in his living room.

Cool. To paraphrase an aphorism, sometimes the best recording device is the one you have with you.

A song created by artificial intelligence

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[VIDEO]: Chris Mench, writing for Complex:

Scientists at Sony’s CSL research lab unveiled a new track called “Daddy’s Car.” If that sounds bizarre to you, you’re not wrong. Although the song sounds like any run-of-the-mill track, it’s actually created by the artificial intelligence software Flow Machines. The software draws from a massive database of songs to compose its music, combining small elements of many tracks to create new compositions. All someone has to do to create a song is choose a style of music or artist from the database and the software will make the score for them. The most represented genres are jazz and pop, but all types of music are represented. In this case, a musician named Benoît Carré wrote the lyrics and arranged the music.

The song is embedded in our main post. Take a listen. Even if this style of music is not your cup of tea, set that aside and listen to the changes and harmonies. There’s a lot of derived musical techniques at work, all playing very softly together. No edge, no instrumental expression, but lots of vocal shifts. I’m hearing Beatles and XTC.

To me, this is a harbinger of things to come. Our robotic overlords have their sights set on our music streaming revenue.

The advantages that come with Lightning headphones

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Kevin Fox:

Bluetooth, maligned early on for sub-par connectivity and audio quality, has come a very long way, and within a few years wired headphones will be seen as much an outlier as a wired mouse or trackpad. It’s Apple’s style to predict and support this transition at the hardware level by taking away the safety net of a headphone plug that hasn’t changed fundamentally since the ¼” jack was introduced 138 years ago. Nobody alive today has ever known a world without this plug.

To put it bluntly, headphones that plug into the 3.5mm jack are dumb. Literally. At the base level, they’re just wires conducting current to tiny speaker coils, without electronics at all. Sure, some are smarter with inline controls or analog signal processing such as bass boosting or noise cancellation, but most headphones are just dumb wires. And we know how Apple feels about wires, even if they’re pretty smart.

Read the post for details on the vast improvements that will come with Lightning connected headphones and thoughts on the evolution of existing products, like the MacBook Pro, that currently ship with a 3.5mm port.

Eddie Van Halen talks about building the Frankenstein, crash testing an amp

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From the interview, starting when EVH was a kid:

When I first started playing guitar, I was at the local music store, which wasn’t even a music store, it was kind of like a Radio Shack that also sold musical instruments, it was called Lafayette Music.

I fell in love with this hollowbody 12-string because of the neck, and the first thing I did was I took six strings off, because it was a 12-string, and I didn’t want 12! They didn’t have what I wanted in the store, so it had already started there!

And:

I saved the money from delivering papers for two and a half to three years, and bought my first real guitar, which was a ’68 Goldtop Les Paul with single-coil P-90 pickups.

So what do I do? I take the chisel to it right away! Because I wanted a humbucking pickup! But in Pasadena, there were no Les Pauls with a humbucker in them. There was one store in northern Pasadena – a Les Paul came in and they called me right away ‘Hey, we’ve got a Les Paul!’ I walk in and I go, ‘Ah, shit! It ain’t the kind Clapton plays!’ It didn’t have humbuckers.

So, of course, I hunted down a humbucker, took a chisel and made the hole bigger and crammed it in there. I was lucky enough to solder it back properly, then I painted it black and added binding. I did all kinds of crazy shit to it.

So much more. This is a great read.

The most famous band formed each year since 1951

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Pretty Famous:

PrettyFamous, an entertainment research site by Graphiq, found the most famous band formed each year since 1951. To do this, they created a customized Band Score on a scale of 1 to 100 based on a weighted average of a band’s Wikipedia page views in the last 30 days, page views of album releases and total number of Spotify followers.

The bands with the highest Band Score from each year were then ordered into a list starting in 1951 and continuing to 2015. It is important to note that since Wikipedia page views are current, all of these bands have stood the test of time, and remained famous many years after they were formed.

Interesting methodology. Not sure how you’d come up with a better measure of fame without turning straight to sales numbers.

Regardless, I found this pretty interesting. Scroll down to the tool, type in a year, then start clicking the arrow just to the right of the band picture to step through other bands formed in that year.

Apple partners with NASA to produce “Visions of Harmony”

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From this USA Today article:

The maker of the iconic iPhone has partnered with NASA on the eve of the Juno mission, which is expected to enter Jupiter’s orbit Monday, in a highly publicized July 4th orbital insertion. The mission launched five years ago.

NASA will send back sounds of space for artists to make music with, to be featured on Apple’s iTunes and the Apple Music subscription service.

Watch the video in the main post. Beautifully done.